Perseus thinks that most blogs have an audience of about 12 readers.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nThis may be true, but it is entirely beside the point. First of all,
\n if this average takes into account the 50% of blogs which have been "abandoned"
\n (or never really utilized by their creators) then the average number
\n of readers of the remaining "real" blogs would be 24. But
\n more important if the Blogosphere is ever going to offer a viable alternative
\n to the Major Media Monopoly is needs to act like a neural network and
\n a cognitive filter for information which bubbles up from the bottom into
\n collective consciousness.<\/p>\n
The Blogosphere is like a circulatory system for information within
\n the body politic. Not
\n all of the conduits can be or should be arteries. Some are capillaries,
\n relatively tiny information streams reaching into every nook and cranny
\n of both the
\n physical and virtual worlds, and funneling streams of data onward and
\n upward, potentially into the very heart and mind of the collective body
\n politic.<\/p>\n
Hopefully, someday whenever a newsworthy event or idea happens there
\n will be a blogger nearby. The ideas and information streams which
\n resonate within whichever corner of the blogging universe they originate
\n in will be picked up and relayed, by nodes with increasingly high rates
\n of connectivity and flow. Information objects which are timely,
\n informative, uniquely positioned, well-written or aesthetically designed
\n will float to the top and eventually come to the attention of a significant
\n proportion of the wired public.<\/p>\n
This at least is the Dowbrigade’s vision of how the whole thing could
\n work out. How quickly and efficiently the Blogosphere could function
\n as a "news" medium without centralized design and control (anathema to
\n this paradigm) remain to be
\n seen. However,
\n the technology and ethos are spreading like a virus and we believe that
\n unfolding events will increasingly expose the inadequacy of the conventional
\n media and the desperate need for an alternative.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A recent white paper released by Perseus Development Corp. has the Blogosphere all astir. Last night I heard it described by one of its authors as "a Rorschach inkblot of the blogging world." John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-links"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1754\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}